The Paul Wells Show - A crisis of confidence in Canadian universities

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

Paul breaks down some of the major challenges facing higher education in Canada, including a lack of political will to invest in the sector.    He is then joined by a panel of insiders for their takes on what to do about it. How are they handling this moment? What does the future look like? And how can universities make the case for their relevance in a changing world?   The panelists are: Graham Carr, President and Vice-Chancellor of Concordia University Maud Cohen, President of Polytechnique Montréal Christopher Manfredi, Provost and Executive Vice-President (Academic) at McGill University Season 3 of The Paul Wells Show is sponsored by McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy.

The Paul Wells Show is made possible by McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy, where I'm a senior fellow. I am happy to be speaking tonight in my capacity as a Max Bell Foundation Fellow at McGill University. This is the first of several talks I'll be giving in different cities on topics in public policy. But what I told the Foundation when they asked me to do this is that I work best when I'm starting conversations, not dominating them. So at each of these events my remarks are only the prologue to a fuller conversation among experts in the field. Tonight those guests are Christopher Manfredi, the Provost and Executive Vice President Academic here at McGill, Maude Cohen, President of the Ecole Polytechnique, and Graham Carr,

the President and Vice Chancellor of Concordia University. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to the Paul Wells Show. So I am pleased to be at a great university talking about universities. But I come from news so I'm often preoccupied with whatever just happened. And I come from Ottawa so I'm especially preoccupied if it's something that happened in politics. So let me begin with some thoughts on the economic policy that was published on Monday by the man who's been shaking up federal politics, Mark Carney.

Mr. Carney was the governor of central banks in two countries, Canada and the UK, something nobody else has ever done. He's running to be prime minister. It's been going well. And he's running as the smart guy, bringing a level of seriousness that's been hard to find in Ottawa. This policy document that he released on Monday is designed to deepen that brand advantage. Carney writes, quote, the core mission of my government would be to grow the strongest economy in the G7. That means growth that improves the quality of life of all Canadians, increases the real wages of all Canadians, supports and improves our social model,

finances our rising security needs, and provides Canadians with a deserved sense of optimism and confidence that our future will be much better than our past. And while he's doing all that, he promises to support young people in fulfilling their potential. How? By cutting taxes for the middle class and providing additional boosts to the incomes of younger Canadians so they can build a prosperous future. Now I've got some specific concerns with Carney's plan that I might yet get around to writing about, but it's fair to say that a strong economy, rising wages and confidence in the future are exactly what people want a political leader to talk about. Mark Carney will probably win the

Liberal leadership next month and the prospect of his arrival is making liberals competitive again in the polls as they face Pierre Pauli's conservatives in an election that will probably happen soon. So good for him. But what was striking to me as I read this platform, knowing that I would be speaking to you tonight, is that the word university does not appear anywhere in the document. The word college does not appear. The word research does not appear.

The words education and innovation do appear one time each. Each time it's in conjunction with an ambitious project that excites Mr. Carney so much he doesn't really pause to explain it. He wants to leverage AI and deploy AI and harness AI and lead the world in AI. Now sure, leveraging and deploying all of this artificial intelligence will probably also require the deployment somewhere along the line of some intelligence. And at no point in Carney's brief manifesto does he express active antagonism toward higher education.

I suspect he'd be surprised to learn that his own economic plan uses the word catalyze four times and the word university not at all. He'd probably protest that higher education is implied, or that it goes without saying, or that he'll mention it tomorrow. After all, this is a man who spent 11 years at two of the world's most revered universities, Harvard and Oxford, and whose career since then would be unimaginable if he hadn't. But trade isn't implied in the platform document, he mentions it nine times. NORAD isn't assumed in his plans for the future, or the Parliamentary Budget Officer, or manufacturing, or Indigenous Reconciliation, or North Korea.

He uses his words to talk about all of that stuff. And incidentally, if by now you think I'm picking on Mark Carney, I should point out that another leading candidate for the party's leadership, Krista Freeland, has been more detailed in her own policy proposals than Carney has. When you're number two, you have to try harder. But I can't find a single reference to universities in any of her stuff either, nor any mention of research.

She does want to help young Canadians build our sustainable future. She'll do that by making trade schools free. This is all starting to get a bit odd. Just like her colleague Mark Carney, Freeland went to Harvard and Oxford. Unlike him, she's been a cabinet minister in a government formed by a party that was elected and re-elected. She's had to make governing decisions. In that capacity, as Canada's finance minister less than a year ago, she said in her 2024 budget speech, a prosperous future and abundant good paying jobs depend on Canada's innovators, entrepreneurs and researchers. That is why

we are supporting them. That budget provided $5 billion for AI Compute and increases to the budgets of the research grounding councils which pay for a lot of Canada's university research. These investments were belated because Justin Trudeau's Liberal government has been only sporadically interested in higher education and research, but at least the money was there. The new spending followed recommendations by Frédéric Bouchard, the Dean of Arts and Sciences at the Université de Montréal, in a report he wrote for the federal government. But when I say the budget provided five billion dollars for university research, what I mean is that the budget said some government really should spend five billion

dollars on university research over several years. In the 2024 budget year, only 13 percent of that money actually got spent. The other 87 percent is hanging out there in the future. Decisions on whether to spend it will of course be made by future governments. So it may be a problem that the two most prominent candidates to run one of those governments have forgotten that Canada has universities. And of course, there's no guarantee that a liberal will be prime minister in a year. Pierre Poliev, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, and still the likeliest winner of the next election, has been talking about universities. Two months ago, he told the Winnipeg Jewish Review that he

will defund all of those with a woke anti-semitic agenda, including at universities who receive federal funding, as well as all federally funded museums. He said he'll defund all those who are imposing a radical, terrifying, toxic ideology, and this will apply to everything that the federal government controls. So if you want a leader who's been talking about universities, there you go. I'm making a broader point here. The public statements of politicians have a relationship to public opinion. Sometimes politicians are a leading indicator,

rushing boldly ahead of conventional wisdom on an issue. Sometimes they're a lagging indicator trying their best to catch up. And sometimes they simply keep their distance. This is one of those times. I've never seen universities more absent from our politics. For those of us who believe universities and higher education more generally can be ingredients in a country's prosperity and success. There's nothing benign in that neglect. This becomes clearer when we look at what's been going on in several provinces. For much of what follows, I'm indebted to Alex Usher at Higher Education Strategy Associates, who reads every party's election platform before every provincial election to see what's been being proposed on higher education.

Because there have been many elections lately, Alex has been busy lately. Ontario is electing a provincial government today. Alex called the Ontario Liberals' higher education proposals, quote, objectively the worst liberal platform commitment on post-secondary education anywhere in Canada in my lifetime just awful. Of Premier Doug Ford and his progressive conservatives, Alex writes that quote Ontario has never been a leader in funding or regulating post-secondary education but the Ford government has taken things to new depths sometimes by ignorance or sins of omission but more often

through acts of deliberate vandalism, like a tuition freeze, a deliberate supercharging of international student enrollments at colleges, and of course an utter failure to deal with the fallout when the federal government called a halt to things. They are a disaster. Great thing about Alex is you can never tell who you would rather you vote for. To its credit, Ford's government has recently announced the creation of new medical schools at York University and Toronto Metropolitan University. But the cost pressure facing every university in the province won't spare those two just because they're now running ambitious new programs. It's the same story in other provinces. The NDP

in Saskatchewan and the Conservative Party of BC have little in common, but their platforms last year had no university-related promises at all. Parties that did mention higher education in their platforms were often focused on reducing the cost to students. This is a telling choice. Deciding whether to attend university entails a cost-benefit analysis. Lately, political parties would rather compress the cost than increase the benefit. This is new in my experience. Governments that were excited about the future used to want to get closer to universities,

because universities represented youth and discovery. On the first full day of the 2000 federal election campaign, I was amazed to follow Jean Chrétien into the Computed Rotational Angiography Lab at the John P. Robards Research Institute at the University of Western Ontario, my alma mater. His opponent was a younger man, Stockwell Day, who led the short-lived Canadian Alliance party. Kretchen's goal was to show that at any age, he still understood the future better. So he spent a lot of time in rooms full of lab coats.

After that 2000 campaign, Kretchen's majority in parliament was bigger than before. For years afterward, thinking about the future meant thinking about universities. Here's my favorite example. In 2007, the British Columbia government under Premier Gordon Campbell published a report written by a former provincial attorney general called Campus 2020. Its top-level goal was to make British Columbia the best educated jurisdiction in North America by 2020, only 13 years hence at that time. Along the way, BC was supposed to achieve the highest level of participation in post-secondary education in the country, and Indigenous rates of post-secondary attainment would match the

rates in the general population. Reaching these targets, the report said, will require leadership, planning, commitment, focus, resources, and innovation. In the end, BC ended up not reaching those targets. Fortunately, not reaching those targets required less leadership, less planning, less commitment, and less focus. So that was easier. But just because the discourse on universities changed, I don't believe or want to be seen claiming that the politicians of the early 2000s were brave visionaries and the politicians of the 2010s were functionaries bereft of vision. Politicians almost always do their best.

I just think the context has changed in important ways. Let me list a few. First, the longer any budget line grows, the harder it becomes to sustain that growth. And the more tempting it becomes to ease up. It's the law of geometric progression, and it applies to higher education in Canada as it does to anything. Higher education in Canada grew very fast for many years. The country had 22,000 university undergraduates in 1920 and four times as many in 1948, the peak of

post-war free tuition for veterans. But because going to university wasn't the only thing that veterans did after the war, Canada soon had a baby boom to manage. So university enrollment quadrupled again by 1966. By then it wasn't just the scale of higher education that was changing, but its nature. Community and technical colleges were added to the system. Universities became centers of research as well as scholarship. That's more expensive. So not only did enrollment triple

from 1960 to 1974, spending per student nearly doubled at the same time. The oil crisis of 1974 brought a durable end to the spree for nearly 20 years. By the time Canada got its fiscal house in order, Jean Chrétien was prime minister, his brother was a medical researcher, and rapid increases in federal funding for university research became something the sector thought it could count on once again. But the numbers involved by this point were large. Any government faces competing claims for that kind of money, infrastructure, national defense, family benefits. And thanks to something else that happened while Kretchen was prime minister, the sponsorship scandal that led to the liberals

losing power for a decade, governments had become far more concerned about being able to account later for every dollar that they spent. One of the most wonderful things about research is that it's inherently mysterious. Sometimes a line of investigation doesn't pan out. Sometimes an experiment kills a beautiful hypothesis.

Sometimes it leads to discoveries with implications very far from the original hypothesis, with applications very far from the original field of study. You can't really predict the outcome of research. Really the only way to know how it's going to work out is to do the research. Jeffrey Hinton's work on AI was considered a terrible bet for many years before it started to pay off big. Tony Pauzen's work on signal transduction in cells began with a question about an odd virus that occurs naturally in chickens. For decades in three different countries, he managed to get funding for this research, but at the beginning nobody was excited about it. They were more excited later when Pau's discoveries led to a global industry in protein kinase inhibitors, a class of drugs that are today worth tens of billions of dollars.

You just never know what you're going to get. Increasingly, governments hate that. They don't know how to explain it to their bosses, whether they're superiors in a minister's office or to the people who elect them. Accountability isn't the only obstacle to unfettered research. So is the growing obsession in large organizations with a certain idea of effective communications. I've written a lot about this. When smartphones and social media became ubiquitous after 2008, the amount of random content our civilization pushes out increased

exponentially. Five exabytes, or five billion billion bytes of data, could store all the words ever spoken by humans between the birth of the world and 2003, the Harvard Business School economist Bharat Anand has written. In 2011, five exabytes of content were created every two days. This meant that anyone in the communications business was now shutting into a hurricane. Anand writes, it's a strategic and marketing nightmare even to make consumers aware of what you're producing. He calls this the problem of getting noticed. The response to this cacophony was the rise of message discipline as a paramount virtue for large organizations. If you have

anything to say in that horrible mess out there, say what you're doing. Say it in a simple, catchy way. Repeat it endlessly because it will take forever for your message to cut through. Don't say anything else because it'll just confuse your message. And above all, don't listen. Don't let new information distract you because you might change your message to reflect this

new information and that will just confuse your message too. So the worst thing that can happen change your message to reflect this new information, and that will just confuse your message too. So the worst thing that can happen to your message is you paying any attention to anyone else's message. This isn't a hobby for people in public life. It's an overriding strategic imperative. It explains a lot of politicians' weird behavior these days. If you can't sell your story, you have no story, which means you can't be heard and you can't win.

If you're in a government, your message is always going to be an essentially heroic story about how you fixed a big problem and made everything better. I built more homes. I made life affordable. I brought Canada back. This heroic vision is easier to sell if the politician can claim a direct link between

action and outcome. I leveraged AI is a good heroic story. A man stands up. He has a lever. There's AI. Here's a much harder heroic story to sell. I gave scientists some of your money. They decided among

themselves how it would be spent. We're pretty sure it will all work out. Next year I'll give them more. So for all these reasons it's much harder to get increases in funding than it used to be. But universities and especially community colleges in Canada have understood for many years that government's willingness to support their research mission was flagging, which is why so many higher education institutions spent the last decade turning like sunflowers away from research dollars as a way of paying the bills and toward international students. We know how that turned out. For a while, governments and higher education institutions worked together to bring in international students at an unprecedented rate, especially in Ontario and especially in some of that

province's community colleges. Then it all came crashing down. Ballooning student populations put too much pressure on housing stock, and a year ago, Marc Miller, the Immigration Minister, announced a two-year cap on international student permits. In itself, that represents a substantial cut in total funding for higher education. But some provinces have gone further. Yesterday, Quebec's government announced it will accept 20% fewer international students next year than it did last year. People who've been trying to run institutions of higher education must feel like they've been getting a runaround.

Shortly, I'll be joined for a panel discussion by distinguished administrators from McGill, Concordia, and the École Pellet Technique. But here's a quick version of what those places have been through. In 2012, after province-wide protests, governments in Quebec abandoned tuition increases for university students from Quebec. So whoever was going to pay for Quebec's universities, it mostly wouldn't be the sons and daughters of Quebec families. At the time, it was reasonable to assume governments would pay more, and more, for universities out of general revenues, and that an activist federal government

would keep increasing its research budget. And that Canadian students from outside Quebec would pay more. And that students from other countries would pay more. But governments got tired of putting ever higher amounts toward higher education. Research funding fell out of fashion. Last year, the Legault government decided there were too many students from outside Quebec, so it made it harder and more expensive for them to come here.

International students were all that was left as a significant source of higher income for the system. Now there will be fewer of them, too. So far, I've mostly been talking about universities as a function of costs and revenues. Of course, that's a terribly arid way to talk. It shortchanges the remarkable contributions of Canada's finest academics and the students they attract and inspire. But it also neglects a less lovely aspect of university life in recent years, which is the cultural debate that they provoke.

If you talk to parents of university-aged children, these days you are likely to hear them talk about four undergraduate years as a questionable indulgence. More and more parents, I know, are resigned to the idea that the student and the family will need some vocational training after university to teach them something useful, and increasingly as a kind of detox. Campuses have been the centre of some extraordinarily acrimonious debates in recent years. I don't know a lot of people who think those debates have helped much. I don't know a lot of people who want to bring those debates into their workplaces. When he was a candidate for the Liberal leadership 12 years ago, Justin Trudeau talked about

public and private investment in science and the innovation and productivity growth that it spurs. I think fewer people are convinced these days that investment in higher education is synonymous with investment in science. And I think that in particular, people doubt that we're getting a lot of innovation from our universities or anything likely to increase productivity, which is how we get a front-running candidate for the highest political job in the country talking about artificial intelligence as though we're the product of a virgin birth.

Sure, harness and deploy and leverage AI, but don't talk about where it comes from and don't try to have more of that stuff happening. It's just too fraught. I have in the last couple of years become a bit of a hanging judge on the social role of Canadian higher education. I'm the guy who shows up and reigns on the parade. All I can say is that it goes against instinct. I will never forget the wonderful days that I spent in university. I'm always happy to be back on a campus.

And I strongly believe that there is no problem that Canada faces that will get better if we deprive the debate around that problem of intelligence and research and imagination. And the other thing I can say is that the people we're about to hear from know more about all of this than I do and that Canada already benefits from their optimism and their industry. But the first step is to admit you have a problem. With that step taken care of, I'd like to invite our panelists up on here. It's a great honor to be joined by Christopher Manfredi from McGill, Maud Cohen from the Ecole Polytechnique, Graham Carr from Concordia University. Chris, what's your read on the role of higher education in Canadian society these days?

Well, let me start, I think, with your last comment, Paul, which was you have to admit there's a problem. First of all, it's not an issue that's just facing Canadian higher education. If you take a look at the United States, Gallup polls have consistently shown over the last about five years that public confidence in higher education has declined from about 60% down to 35%. So there's a public issue there. I will say there's good news in that the higher education is still in the top five and it's better off than newspapers, television, journalism, and what's at the bottom of the list, which is the US Congress. So that's the good news. And around 64% of the American public thinks that identity politics has come to dominate higher education. So that's something we've got to think about.

The Canadian story is a little bit better, but nevertheless, the trend is the same. We've gone from about a net plus of 57 percentage points to a net plus of 36. So we're still on the plus side, but it's going down. So why is that the case? From about the late 90s into the early 2000s, maybe into the first years of the Harper government, universities told a story and you touched on that story. They told the story that research would generate innovation, would drive productivity, would produce economic growth. The problem is governments stop believing that story and not just the political people, the bureaucrats in finance and industry stop believing that story. So that's something that we've got to start, we've got to think about seriously. A couple of other things I'll say before I turn it over to my colleagues. One is, I think you made a comment that the research

dollars paying the bills. Well, I think it's important that research dollars have never actually paid the bills. Research dollars have paid the direct costs of the research, but they've never covered the indirect costs of that research. So in fact, we've been, in a sense, I'll use a term that I wouldn't normally use. We kind of cannibalize our undergraduate tuition to support our research mission. So you get a double effect there. If research dollars go down and at the same time, we're unable to generate revenue through other activities, then the entire research enterprise goes into a bit of a downward spiral. We've got to think about that. So we have this dilemma. The thing that pays our bills, which is teaching undergraduates, is not the thing on which

our international reputations rest, which is research. So that's something that research universities have to worry about. I'll say one final point about international students. Australia figured out something about a decade before Canada did, which is that higher education is actually an export good. Now, the income is generated within our own borders, but nevertheless, bringing international students into the country is a kind of way of exporting one of our great forms of expertise. I find it very strange. The government of Quebec would never

tell Bombardier to stop selling its business jets to international customers. And so I find this whole emphasis on cutting off what is a really important source of export income for the country very bizarre. There's a lot that we'll be able to discuss in a few moments, but for her opening remarks, Maud Cohen. Thank you first for this wonderful invitation.

When we think about the role of a new universities and how we were built initially, there has always been two parts of our mission. The first one is teaching and the second one is research. parts of our mission. The first one is teaching and the second one is research. And yes, I think at some point there has been a propension to think more about research in our universities than to think about the teaching part. And in reality, when you think about why our universities were created, I mean, Polytechnique was the first francophone engineering university. We were created to give access to French education to population because Quebec needed French engineers, right? And our universities were built to give access to a better life, better

way of living. I'm not sure we're fulfilling really that role for precarious communities. And I'm not sure we're reaching out the way we may be used to more, because we are more focused on research than our teaching. The other thing I'm gonna also mention is the fact that people get fed news differently now. And I'm not sure where we should be to feed the news to people and feed the facts more than the opinions. Our medias

are focusing more on opinions because the short-term vision of our governments is what is guiding right now what the media is. And it's becoming a loop, a loop of how we're feeding the political position and how we're feeding the media. And it's a short, very short term view. But that being said, the news is no longer just on the media side as well. And people get fed all sorts of information. A fact doesn't really matter. Scientific fact doesn't really matter the way it used to. And it gives lacks of credibility as well on our universities.

Graeme Carr, your turn. Thanks for the invitation to be here. What to add? I think universities and Chris is absolutely right. It's not just in Canada. Universities pretty much throughout the Western world are undergoing a real stress test right now. And that's a stress test that's happening on many levels and the stressor is coming from many directions. I think increasingly a lot of us realize that the business model for public higher education in Canada no longer works, hasn't been working for some time.

To use a line that's increasingly becoming a cliche, we've moved from a model where universities in Canada were publicly funded to a situation where they're publicly assisted at best. And I guess the question is whether they're being publicly assisted in dying at this point. It's a really challenging time. We're also at a moment where to some degree universities have lost the plot or lost the capacity to tell the narrative about what their value is in contemporary society. And that partly goes back to something you put your finger on in your opening remarks, Paul, which is just how the world of communications has changed. You know, the reality is that universities have been in the knowledge

business and the expertise business. And we live in an age where disinformation, misinformation and outright lies can get you a long ways it turns out in the world. So there's a bit of a sense of being out of step with a wide trend in society and culture, which is not to say that we should be retreating in any way, shape or form from our commitment to excellence, our commitment to research, our commitment to evidence, but that we need to find a way to communicate that better. And I guess the last thing that I would say is you mentioned also about parents questioning the value proposition of higher education. And I think that's one aspect of the narrative that we've lost sight of. Universities always were and they continue to be important vehicles of social mobility in society. But we sort of stopped

telling that story somehow. I think about my own university Concordia, we had a tagline not so very long ago, real education for the real world. And over time, people said, no, that's not the right time. We want to be more of a research university. We need to get away from that. But the reality is, we have 5,000 students doing co-op stash last year. That's real education for the real world. And that's what's actually going on in a lot of universities. And I think we need to find a way to also make clearer that fantastic things happen on our campuses every day. Students have fantastic experiences.

Our researchers do incredibly creative things, but we've lost, it seems to me, the ability to tell that story. It's interesting that you all keyed in on communications, which I thought was one of the more esoteric themes that I had mentioned. One thing we keep bumping up against as a society is that we've lost the commons. There's no place where everyone gets together to get their information. So a generation ago, being covered in McLean's magazine or in the Globe and Mail or in the press here in town would kind of do it for you, but now not so much.

I have to assume that your students' families are a huge target market for your communications efforts. Am I guessing right? Yes and no. We're targeting the students directly in our case. And I think you're right. I think the influence of the parents is more important than maybe it used to be just because of how parenting happens right now.

I mean, I'm not going to tell a new story, but families used to be 10 children per family. So the parents were less involved now. I think, and I'm the mother of a 19 years old, I'm much more involved into, maybe he doesn't like it, but I'm much more involved than my parents used to be. I'm more informed as well and I'm more, maybe I have more education so I can help him quite a bit. But our narrative need to be focused on the parents though because they're the taxpayers right now that are finding universities useful or not. And I'm going back to the fact that our professors, they no longer want to teach, they want to do research because that's how they grow within our universities

and they lost the touch with the basis, which is the students and the parents hear about that. I want to say a word about the people who are supporting this podcast. McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy is committed to the research, teaching, public outreach and practical advocacy of sound public policy, grounded in a solid understanding of the overall policy process with all its imperfections and limitations. With their one-year intensive Master of Public Policy program, they teach a principle-based design of policy solutions to important problems. Learn more at mcgill.ca slash maxpellschool.

You mentioned something about a commons, universities of commons. So, you know, we can think about universities as places where students pick up useful skills or useful knowledge, a place where research is done that helps improve society. But I think we also have to understand universities as a kind of a carafoora where people from different walks of life, different parts of the country, different parts of their regions come together and have those experiences and that they grow in that sense. And as you said, Paul, you can never actually predict where a research, a line of research will take you, but you actually can't predict what someone will do with their university experience. It's completely unpredictable.

I mean, we're sitting in an event sponsored by the Max Bell School of Public Policy, the Max Bell Foundation. I mean, Max Bell was born in Regina. He came and studied at McGill at the beginning of the depression. He went back west, was financially successful, came back to Montreal because of a neurological condition that led him to the Montreal Neurological Institute. But as a result of all that, he amassed some wealth, became a philanthropist, and that wealth has been re-injected into Canadian society, into Quebec society to support education, healthcare. You can't predict that sort of stuff. So that's one of the things that universities, I think, are really important vehicles for.

I went to Western, I thought I was going to be a doctor. That lasted three weeks. And I took two years of undergrad chemistry before washing out into political science. So the surprise was that I became a journalist. And the second surprise was that it turned out that wasn't even failure. I once told the administration at Western that a good marketing slogan for a university would be, you

have no idea what you're getting yourself into. Uh, they didn't agree with me that that was a good slogan. Graham, I cut you off. No, no, it's fine. I mean, I think,. I think the original question was about appealing to parents and marketing. I think again, we have to differentiate, right? So when research universities like ours, somewhere between 15 and 25% of our student population

are graduate students. So I don't think their parents are the relevant marketing target. I think most university websites, if you take a quick look at them, they have one audience in mind, and that's a prospective student, period. And it's a highly competitive environment. So that's who you're trying to reach. Yes, parents are important, but, you know, 18-year-olds are adults. And they choose programs and they choose universities for a whole variety of reasons

that may bear some relationship to their parents' hopes and desires, but hopefully more strongly reflect their own passions and curiosities. And it's a circuitous path through university for an awful lot of people. So where you end up and what you end up doing with your university degree is I think, um,

influenced by a lot of other factors besides what you may or may not have learned in the classroom. I want to ask all of you for your ideas for the future of Canadian universities, but I want to put to you something that I hear frequently from my readers, which is that if there's a mismatch between the sector's ambitions and its wallet, then maybe the ambitions are too big. And maybe we need to right size higher education by making it smaller. I'm sure I'm not the first person to

put that idea to you. What do you make of it? Well, there's a few things. I wouldn't make it smaller. I would think about it differently, maybe. I was talking about accessibility before, and I think this is really important. We were built to make higher education accessible, and we're not really fulfilling this for some of the population. And we need to think about it. We need to be contributors to the politicians that are thinking about this, to make sure that it becomes accessible. And I don't have the solution, but we have the solution, I'm sure, because people that work within our faculties, within our universities, they're supposed to lead that discussion. They're supposed to be linked with the communities. They're

supposed to be linked with the government about this. So we need to be influencers and I think we're missing the link right now. We're trying to criticize but we're not really bringing solutions and this is something that we have a role towards too. I'm going to give you an example and we're not in education so we're in engineering right, but we have a professor, a young professor, very dynamic. She's working on filters to avoid microplastic going in waste water of washing machine. She was working on something in our labs, very reproducible. You can write an article on this. She can be evaluated on this. But when she was thinking about it, she was like, how am I going to make sure that this is going

to be feasible in the day-to-day lives of Madame or Monsieur that is changing the filter to make sure that in the washing machine, it works, right? So she did a project that was a social project, knowing perfectly that this maybe was going to be more difficult for her in her CV, in her career. But it's something that we need to think about as universities. It's not her role to think about how to make this science more accessible to population and more really concrete to Monsieur Madame Toulmont. It's our role as universities to make sure that she can evolve in our life. And it's the same thing about accessibility, I think, of our university to common population. I think we need to be more solution provider than criticizing.

It's easy to criticize. We can hear everybody criticizing every politics right now. It's very difficult to be a politician. And I think right now what's happening to us is really people are expecting to react more on a quicker basis and be more close to what they're living on a current day-to-day life. It's difficult when you think about the future in research, but it's something that we need to reach the gap. I think we need to think about our future in research, but it's something that we need to reach the gap. I think we need to be more, think about our role differently. Well, I think all of the data demonstrate that university education is still one of the most important ways to advance in terms of social mobility. So Graham mentioned the importance of social mobility. Mo has talked about accessibility. So a university

education is still the quickest way to get up the socioeconomic ladder. And so we have to make sure that we're fully accessible. And of course, one of the ironies is all of these politicians who criticize universities, most of them have university degrees, as you pointed out. So something, you know, they must have gotten something out of it. So we have to try to understand what that was. I think part of your question, Paul, was about size and growth in universities. So I think the reality in Canada with the way in which public funding was set up for higher education was all predicated on the growth model. It certainly has been in the last few years. As levels of government investment, direct investment in higher education go down,

universities had to compensate for that. And the way to compensate for that was by welcoming more students. So we've been on a growth model for a long, long time. And the question is, how sustainable is that? And I think we're realizing in the current context that it's no longer sustainable. But what also happened over that same period of time was that the market for education or the market for knowledge changed. So yes, there's been a proliferation of universities. I think there are 97 or 98 in Canada now. That's an awful lot. And at the same time, there's been an enormous proliferation of colleges or in Quebec Sajabs providing an alternative pathway to education, higher education in the post-secondary

world. And now of course, there's a third actor, which are all the private credential providers, whether it's Google or Amazon, et cetera. So the competitive landscape for universities in terms of recruitment in the 18 to 24-year-old market doesn't bear any resemblance to what it looked like 15 or 20 years ago. So is the answer to that to shrink? I don't know, but I think that's a fair question. But I think it's important in asking that question about size to understand what the model has been, that the model is now broken and that while the model has been in the process of breaking, the competitive landscape has also changed enormously. So the rethink ahead for the business model of the future for higher education

is going to require really radical thinking, I believe. Graham Carr, at Concordia, you have had to close programs down and close organizations down. What's that like? Well, we haven't actually closed programs, but I have to say yet, I realize that's happening elsewhere across the country. We're dealing with a major deficit challenge as other universities in Canada are, you talk about shrinkage. So one of the areas where we've been shrinking is in terms of our personnel, not renewing contracts, closing vacant positions, putting a freeze on hiring, all of which has a negative effect on people who are left within the organization. It's not great for morale. And it's not great in terms of allowing

you to invest in your future because sometimes you're being forced to make decisions on budgetary grounds rather than a more complex set of factors that you'd like to use. I think morale is really under assault in higher education right now. Notwithstanding, as I said, all the great things that are happening on campuses every day, I think the mood is pretty grim. It's pretty uncertain about the future. I want to cheer you up by talking about recent developments in US politics. The Vice President of the United States, who studied at Harvard, has said that universities are the enemy. The administration has at least announced, we'll see whether these cuts are durable, but they've announced cuts to the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease

Control, USAID, which was a major market for university graduates since it was founded. Is that an opportunity for Canadian higher education that Canada can sort of mow their lawn? Or are you worried that it is going to be contagious? Look, it's a great opportunity that we're throwing away. Right? I mean, we're at the precise moment when we should be opening ourselves to the world. We should be welcoming the best student minds, the best research minds, the best teaching minds, and we're kind of letting that all pass by us because we've

got some other things on our side. In fact, the contagion has kind of spread and it's spread in a way that has prevented us from taking advantage of a great opportunity. I remember in 2017, there were active efforts to recruit disgruntled American academics, in some cases successful. Are there similar efforts now? Well, there might be in the ROC, but it's going to be much more difficult for us to do it since yesterday's news. I mean, it's already a struggle to recruit talent, recruit good students, because we're in a competitive environment. And we have government policies that are really preventing us to be more active.

And not only that, but that are giving us really a bad reputation around the world. I don't know if you saw Le Monde, which is a French paper that had something requiring students to testify, students from France that have struggled getting their student permit visa to testify about this. So we're probably going to get a few articles in the next few months, a few weeks about that. And honestly, for us, you know, it's quantic, it's AI, it's semi-conductors, it's kushmains, it's really highly-scientifical themes. And we're an engineering school, so whatever fundamental research we're doing is much more at a higher level, I'd say, than fundamental research that might happen in other universities.

So it's a time where we could get talents to come and help us. But I'm going to go back to accessibility of research and I'm going to talk about AI. Because yes, we did great things here in Quebec and in Canada and mainly in Montreal, but we haven't been able to transfer it successfully to the population. It's the U.S. that have done that. And we have invested so much in the fundamental research part of it, but we have missed the mark on transferring.

And now the cost of doing that is going to be so high that it's going to be a struggle for us to really remain competitive at that point. And now the cost of doing that is going to be so high that it's going to be a struggle for us to really remain competitive at that point. And this is why, I mean, I have a lot of solidarity. You can ask my two friends, I'm always on their side, but this is where I think we're not living the same struggles, I think, because we're more on a transferable level and the government, they like us most of the time, even the conservatives one, because we talk with the industry more, we're more linked with our engineers, they don't work on top, they work on the floors.

But what I'm saying is we tell a story that talks to the public, that talks to the leaders. And I think this needs to be more transferable. And this is why I know that I'm saying things that sometimes you guys don't agree because you're more on the fundamental side of it. But in the next few years to rebuild trust, this is what's gonna need to happen. We need to reach out.

We need to be more understandable. We need to use a language that people can relate to and they can understand concretely how this is going to help them even if it's in the more long term. Yeah I think I think Paul part of the challenge around the we're missing an opportunity for sure to recruit talent. But to me, the question that has to be asked or the argument that has to be framed is what are we recruiting the talent for? And what's the imagination of the future, the future economy, the future society that we want to build? And I think until we can design that narrative and tell that story effectively, it's difficult to persuade people why we should

be bringing in more incredibly talented biochemists or something. To go back to your comments about Mark Carney and in fairness to Mark Carney, he did mention universities in one of the leadership debates afterwards. I believe I had nodded off by that point. But there has to be an alignment between where people imagine society is going in the future and the speed with which things are changing. To survive in the future, the complex of skills that the next generation will need to have is far more widespread and far deeper than our generations. So how can we provide those skills? If we want to make the argument about the importance of talent, it can't just stop with we need talent. We need to be able to explain why that talent is going to deliver a better future for Canada.

I think we fixed everything. At least we noticed a lot. I want to thank the distinguished members of this panel, Christopher Manfredi, Maud Cohen, Graham Carr. Thank you so much for sharing your experience with everyone tonight. Thanks to you for coming out and thanks to

McGill for welcoming me as a fellow. Have a good night. Thanks for listening to the Paul Wells show. The Paul Wells show is produced by Antica and it's produced by the American Theatre Association. The show is produced by the American Theatre Association. The show is produced by the Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica and supported by McGill University's Max

Bell School of Public Policy. My producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producer is Stuart Cox. Laura Regehr is Antica's head of audio. If you subscribe to my sub stack, you can get bonus content for this show, as well as access to my newsletter. You can do that at paulwells.substack.com. If you're enjoying this show, give us a good rating on your podcast app. It helps spread the word. We'll be back next Wednesday. Music